Ancient Chinese Universe Creation Myth Legend

Pan Gu is the creator of the universe in Chinese myth Legend. He created the world.

In the beginning, the universe was like a big egg. Inside was darkness chaos. After a long, long time, a giant was born in the egg-shaped space. His name was Pan Gu. Pan Gu slept for 18,000 years. He woke up and opened his eyes, but he could see nothing; he wanted to stretch, but his limbs hit the walls around him; he tried to stand up, but he bumped his head against the ceiling of the egg-shaped space.

Pan Gu began to kick and knock around until he broke the shell and stuck out his head and upper body. He looked around and still saw nothing but darkness. He kicked and knocked again until the substance of darkness began to break up. As a result, the light and clear substance started to float upward to form the sky and the dark and muddy substance began to sink to the bottom to form the earth. Pan Gu was in between, his head against the sky and his feet upon the earth. Fearing that the sky and the earth would come together and form the chaotic darkness again, Pan Gu decided to stay between the sky and the earth until the world became permanently separate. His body began to grow at the speed of ten feet a day. As he grew taller and taller, the sky and the earth were pushed farther and farther apart. Eventually Pan Gu became a giant 90,000 miles tall. Thus the sky and the earth were 90,000 miles apart. Pan Gu was sure that they would never have a chance to come together again.

By now, another 18,000 years had passed. Pan Gu was too exhausted to stand and grow anymore. One day he suddenly dropped to the ground and fell into a sleep from which he never woke. As he died, the parts of his body became the elements of nature. His head, torso, and limbs turned into mountains. His left eye became the sun; his right eye, the moon; and his hair, the myriad stars in the night sky. His last breath became wind, fog, and clouds; his muscles, the soil; his blood, the rivers; his bones and teeth, the minerals and precious stones; his perspiration, the rain and dew; his body hair, the vegetation; and the parasites living in and on his body became the living creatures.

After Pan Gu created the universe, there appeared a goddess who had a human upper body and a snake lower body. Her name was Nv Wa. She was infinitely resourceful, capable of changing into seventy different beings in a single day. All the same, she felt very lonely. She wanted to add something exciting to the earth. She began searching for that something, even though she had no idea what it was. While flying over a river, she looked down and happened to see the reflection of her face in the waters below. It was lively and beautiful. An idea dawned: “Why can’t I create something that will look like me? Then, I will have companions.” So thinking, she landed by the river and started to put her idea into practice.

Fishing some mud from the river, Nv Wa kneaded it into a piece of dough. Then she molded a little figure after her human face and upper body. Instead of a snake lower body like hers, she gave it two limbs that she called legs. The moment she placed the clay figure on the ground, it began to jump around with joy and called her Mom!” She happily named the little figurine ren (human). She then created more ren in the same fashion so that they could populate the world.

Nv Wa worked day and night until she was too tired to go on. Leaning against a mound, she fell asleep. Waking up, she looked around and caught sight of a large pool of muddy water nearby. Something like a rope led her eyes from the edge of the muddy puddle up to the side of the mound. It was a vine. She suddenly had an idea. She dipped the vine in the puddle and whirled it around. As she swung the muddy vine round and round, pieces of mud flew off and soon covered a large area about her. In no time the larger pieces of mud had turned into human beings and the smaller ones into animals. The ren she had molded from the mud she fished from the river became the forebears of noble, and the ren she created from the mud she slung were the ancestors of the common people.

The earth now teamed with life, but Nv Wa’s joy did not last long. In time the humans began to die in great numbers. She realized that as mortals, they eventually would all perish, and she would have to create them all over again. The resourceful Nv Wa never ran out of ideas, so she suggested to herself, “How about letting the humans regenerate themselves?” Acting on her thought, she blew a breath of yang into some of the humans so that they became men and a breath of yin into others so that they turned into women. She then encouraged them to marry for the purpose of reproducing themselves. Since then, humanity has continued from generation to generation.

Humans lived a happy, peaceful life for years, until one day a great disaster struck them. Gong Gong, a red-haired giant, started a war against the Zhuan Xu (another giant). Defeated, Gong Gong became so furious that he banged his humongous head against Bu Zhou Mountain and caused it to crumble. The mountain was in fact one of the pillars of the four corners of the world, (north, south, east, and west), supporting the tent like sky to prevent it from collapsing. Consequently a large chunk of the sky fell. Water gushed out from the big hole and poured onto the earth, which had been quaking violently in the wake of Bu Zhou Mountain’s collapse. The seas swelled and began to submerge land after land. Loong of fire and water and beasts of prey who were flushed out of their dens began to run wild and took a great number of lives.

Nv Wa could not stand seeing the decimation of the humans and other creatures she had created. She was determined to rescue them. Facing such a large-scale calamity, Nv Wa did not panic. Instead, she prioritized what she was going to do. She decided that the damage to the sky was the cause of everything, so took on the task of mending it. She collected a great number of multicolored stones from a riverbed, built a furnace in the Zhong Huang Mountain. And after forty-nine days, melted the stones and created a huge piece of colorful slate. Embedding the slate in the hole, Nv Wa managed to fix the leaking sky. Her action produced an unexpected side effect the shining colors of the slate added to the sky a moon, a rainbow, and numerous stars.

Fearing that the sky might break loose again, Nv Wa slew a giant turtle and propped the sky up with its legs in place of the fallen Bu Zhou Mountain. Seeing that the sky was secure, she turned her attention to the other causes of the disaster. She slaughtered the Loong that had produced excessive fire and water and drove the beasts of prey into the depths of forests and mountains. With the ashes left in the furnace that had produced the colorful slate, she built dams and dikes to check the floods. In the end, when everything on earth returned to normal, Nv Wa was too tired to get up. She fell into a peaceful sleep and never woke up.

i think i was hvng deep intercorse while publishing this comment, tho i ruv china it are a verry nice >_< ^_^

bethany

2012.09.20 12:04

do you guys like chinese history?

Tamara

2012.10.09 17:55

Intreasting to read how alike it is to Christianity adam made from mud , noah .giants ect
……

person 1234

2012.11.26 11:20

i love learning about chinese history SO FUN 😕

Joe

2014.02.26 20:54

Order from chaos, the creation of man in the image of a God,making them male and female a catastrophic flood, a rainbow……. can anyone else see echos of the biblical account of creation? Oh yeah the introduction of a serpent too.